Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (47 page)

“There you go! There you go! Drive the whoresons back!” Nephon Khoumnos shouted. He was hoarse and tired, but increasingly happy over the battle’s course. Ortaias, Phos be praised, was not getting in his way too badly, and the troops were performing better than he’d dared hope. He wondered if Thorisin was having as much success on the right. If he was, soon the Yezda would be surrounded by a ring of steel.

The general sneezed, blinked in annoyance, sneezed again. Despite the sweltering heat, he was suddenly cold; the sweat turned clammy on his body. He shivered inside his armor—there were knives of ice stabbing at his bones. Agony shot through his joints at every move. His eyes bulged. He opened his mouth to cry out, but no words emerged. His last conscious thought was that freezing was not the numb, painless death it was supposed to be.

“They appear to be stepping up the pressure,” Ortaias Sphrantzes said. “What do you think, Khoumnos? Should we commit another brigade to throw them back?” Getting no reply, he turned to glance at the older man. Khoumnos was staring fixedly ahead and did not seem to be giving any heed to his surroundings.

“Are you all right?” Sphrantzes asked. He laid a hand on the general’s bare arm, then jerked it back in horror, leaving skin behind. Touching Khoumnos was like brushing against an ice-glazed wall in dead of winter, but worse, for this was a cold that burned like fire.

Startled at the sudden motion, the general’s horse shied. Its rider swayed, then toppled stiffly; it was as if a frozen statue bestrode the beast. A hundred throats echoed Sphrantzes’ cry of terror, for Khoumnos’ body, like a statue carved from brittle ice, shattered into a thousand frozen shards when it struck the ground.

“A pox!” Gaius Philippus exclaimed. “Something’s gone wrong on the left!” Sensitive to battle’s changing tides as a deer to the shifting breeze, the centurion felt the Yezda swing to the offensive almost before they delivered their attack.

Pakhymer caught the scent of trouble, too, and sent one of his riders galloping south behind the line to find out what it was. He listened as his man reported back, then shouted to the Romans, “Khoumnos is down!”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Marcus muttered. Gaius Philippus clapped his hand to his forehead and swore. Here was a chance the Emperor had left unreckoned—responsibility for a third of the Videssian army had just landed squarely on Ortaias Sphrantzes’ skinny shoulders.

The Khatrisher who brought the news was still talking. Laon Pakhymer heard him out, then spoke so sharply the Romans could hear part
of what he said: “—mouth shut, do you under—” The horseman nodded, gave him an untidy salute, and rode back into line.

“Sure and I wonder what all that was about,” Viridovix said.

Gaius Philippus said, “Nothing good, I’ll warrant.”

“You’re a rare gloomy soul, Roman dear, but I’m afraid you have the right of it this time.”

When his left wing faltered, Mavrikios guessed why. He sent Zeprin the Red south as fast as he could to rescue the situation, but the Haloga marshal found himself caught up in confused and bitter fighting that broke out when a band of Yezda cracked the imperial line and rampaged through the Videssian rear. The northerner’s two-handed axe sent more than one of them to his death, but meanwhile Ortaias Sphrantzes kept command.

Like a ship slowly going down on an even keel, the left’s plight grew worse. The various contingents’ officers led them as best they could, but with Nephon Khoumnos gone their overall guiding force disappeared. Ortaias, in his inexperience, frantically rushed men here and there to counter feints, while failing to answer real assaults.

The left was also a liability in another way. Despite Pakhymer’s silencing his messenger, rumors of how Khoumnos died soon ran through the whole Videssian army. They were confused and sometimes wildly wrong, but Avshar’s name was writ large in all of them. Men in every section of the line looked south in apprehension, awaiting they knew not what.

The Emperor, seeing the failure of his scheme and the way the Yezda were everywhere pressing his disheartened soldiers back, ordered a withdrawal back to the camp he had left so full of hope. Using their superior mobility and the confusion on the left, the Yezda were beginning to slip small parties round the imperial army’s flank. If enough got round to cut the Videssians off from their base, what was now nearly a draw could quickly become disaster.

Mavrikios did not intend to give up the fight. The Videssians could regroup behind their field fortifications and return to the struggle the next morning.

For a moment Marcus did not recognize the new call the drummers and pipers were playing. “Retreat,” for obvious reasons, was not an often-practiced
exercise. When he did realize what the command was, he read Mavrikios’ intentions accurately. “We’ll have another go at them tomorrow,” he predicted to Gaius Philippus.

“No doubt, no doubt,” the centurion agreed. “Hurry up, you fools!” he shouted to the legionaries. “Defensive front—get out there, you spearmen! Hold the losels off us.” His fury came more from habit than need; the Romans were smoothly moving into their covering formation.

“Is it running away we are?” Viridovix demanded. “There’s no sense of it. Aye, we’ve not beaten the spalpeens, but there’s no one would say they’ve beaten us either. Let’s stay at it and have this thing out.” He brandished his sword at the Yezda.

Gaius Philippus sighed, wiped sweat from his face, rubbed absently at a cut on his left cheek. He was as combative as the Celt, but had a firmer grip on the sometimes painful realities of the field. “We’re not beaten, no,” he said. “But there’s wavering all up and down the line, and the gods know what’s going on over there.” He waved his left arm. “Better we move back under our own control than fall apart trying to hold.”

“It’s a cold-blooded style of fighting, sure and it is. Still and all, there’s a bright side to everything—now I’ll have a chance to salt this lovely down properly.” He gave a fond pat to the Yezda head tied to his belt. That was too much even for the hard-bitten centurion, who spat in disgust.

A deliberate fighting retreat is probably the most difficult maneuver to bring off on a battlefield. Soldiers equate withdrawal with defeat, and only the strongest discipline holds panic at bay. The Videssians and their mercenary allies performed better than Marcus would have expected from such a heterogeneous force. Warded by a bristling fence of spears, they began to disengage, dropping back a step here, two more there, gathering up the wounded as they went, always keeping a solid fighting front toward their foes.

“Steady, there!” Marcus grabbed the bridle of Senpat Sviodo’s horse. The young Vaspurakaner was about to charge a Yezda insolently sitting his horse not thirty yards away.

“Turn me loose, damn you!”

“We’ll get this one tomorrow—you’ve done your share for today.” That was nothing less than the truth; Sviodo’s fine wickerwork helm was
broken and hanging loosely over one ear, while his right calf bore a rude bandage that showed the fighting had not all gone his way.

He was still eager for more, touching spurs to his mount to make it rear free of the tribune’s grip.

Scaurus held firm. “If he hasn’t the stomach to close with us, let him go now. All we have to do is keep them off us, and we’ll be fine.”

He glared up at the mutinous Vaspurakaner. To his legionaries he could simply give orders, but Senpat Sviodo was a long way from their obedience—and, to give him his due, he had better reason to hate that grinning Yezda than did the Romans. “I know how happy it would make you to spill his guts out on the dirt, but what if you get in trouble? To say nothing of your grieving your wife, we’d have to rescue you and risk getting cut off while the rest of the army pulled back.”

“Leave Nevrat out of this!” Senpat said hotly. “Were she here, we’d fight that swine together. And as for the rest of it, I don’t need your help and I don’t want it. I don’t care about the lot of you!”

“But want it or not, you’d have it, because we care about you, lad.” Marcus released his hold on the bridle. “Do what you bloody well please—but even Viridovix is with us, you’ll notice.”

There was a pause. “Is he, now?” Senpat Sviodo’s chuckle was not the blithe one he’d had before the army entered ruined Vaspurakan, but Marcus knew he’d won his point. Sviodo wheeled his horse and trotted it back to the Roman line, which had moved on another score of paces while he and Scaurus argued.

The tribune followed more slowly, studying as best he could how well the army was holding together. It really was going better than he’d dared hope; even the left seemed pretty firm. “You know,” he said, catching up to the Vaspurakaner, “I do believe this is going to work.”

Avshar watched Ortaias Sphrantzes canter down the Videssian left wing toward the center. Behind the robes that masked him, he might have smiled.

“Dress your lines! Keep good order!” Sphrantzes called, waving energetically to his men. This business of war was as exciting as he’d thought it would be, if more difficult. Decisions had to come at once, and situations did not easily fit into the neat categories Mindes Kalokyres outlined. When they did, they changed so quickly that orders were often worthless as soon as they were given.

The noble knew he had been outmaneuvered several times and lost troops as a result. It pained him; these were not symbols drawn on parchment or pieces to be taken cleanly from a board, but men who fought and bled and died so he could learn his trade.

Still, on the whole he did not think he had done badly. There had been breakthroughs, yes, but never a serious one—he did not know he still held command because of one of those breakthroughs. His mere presence, he thought, went a long way toward heartening his men. He knew what a fine warlike picture he made with his gilded helmet and armor, his burnished rapier with its jeweled hilt, and his military cape floating behind him in the breeze.

True, there had been that terrible moment when Avshar’s sorcery reached out to slay Nephon Khoumnos. But even the white-shrouded villain was according him the respect he deserved, always shadowing him as he rode up and down the line.

He had done everything, in short, that a general could reasonably be expected to do … except fight.

Horns blared in the enemy ranks. Sphrantzes’ lip curled at the discords they raised. Then the disdain vanished from his face, to be replaced by dread. A thousand Yezda were spurring straight at him, and at their head was Avshar.

“Ortaias!” the wizard-prince cried, voice spectrally clear through the thunder of hoofbeats. “I have a gift for thee, Ortaias!” He lifted a mailed fist. The blade therein was no bejeweled toy, but a great murdering broadsword, red-black with the dried blood of victims beyond number.

First among all the Videssians, Ortaias Sphrantzes in his mind’s eye penetrated Avshar’s swaddling veils to see his face, and the name of that face was fear. His bowels turned to water, his heart to ice.

“Phos have mercy on us! We are undone!” he squealed. He wheeled his horse, jabbed his heels into its flanks. Hunched low to ride the faster, he spurred his way back through his startled soldiers—just as Avshar, taking his measure, had foreseen. “All’s lost! All’s lost!” he wailed. Then he was past the last of his men, galloping east as fast as his high-bred mount would run.

A moment later the Videssian line behind him, stunned by its general’s defection, smashed into ruin under the wizard’s hammer-stroke.

Take a pitcher of water outside on a cold winter’s day. If the water is very pure and you do not disturb it; it may stay liquid long after you would expect it to freeze. But let a snowflake settle on the surface of this super-cooled water, and it will be ice clear through in less time than it takes to tell.

So it was with the Videssian army, for Ortaias Sphrantzes’ flight was the snowflake that congealed retreat into panic. And with a gaping hole torn in its ranks, and Yezda gushing through to take the army in flank and rear, terror was far from unwarranted.

“Well, that’s done it!” Gaius Philippus said, angry beyond profanity. “Form square!” he shouted, then explained to Marcus, “The better order we show, the less likely the sods are to come down on us. The gods know they’ll have easier pickings elsewhere.”

The tribune nodded in bitter agreement. The amputated left wing of the army was already breaking up in flight. Here and there knots of brave or stubborn men still struggled against the nomads who were enveloping them on all sides, but more and more rode east as fast as they could go, throwing away shields, helms, even swords to flee more quickly. Whooping gleefully, the Yezda pursued them like boys after rabbits.

But Avshar kept enough control over the unruly host he led to swing most of it back for the killing stroke against the Videssian center. Assailed simultaneously from front and rear, many units simply ceased to be. They lacked the Romans’ long-drilled flexibility and tore their ranks to pieces trying to redeploy. Even proud squadrons of Halogai splintered beyond repair. The Yezda surged into the gaps confusion created and spread slaughter with bow and saber. Survivors scattered all over the field.